Krysia Jopek

The newly-fallen snow lights up the night.

We are beholden in the field of the poem.

When the planes lean down into their lights to land, we still ourselves in sink holes from long-ago buried tree trunks.

No one really remembers.

How the plow truck almost found us walking at the edge of the front yard.

How one sable, velvet glove waved to the confused old man from the frozen stream.

Or that there are plastic coffins amassed at the left corner of night in case the plane loses its passengers en route home.

But it’s very late now.

The stars are hidden behind a gauze of cloud-blanket not fog.

One street lamp blinks in and out, a misplaced lighthouse overlooking ice-encrusted tar.

A lazy eye wandering the neighborhood looking for coyotes.

When the missing glove is realized, one is already preoccupied with paying for this month’s electricity, this winter’s heating oil—while lining the pills up on the counter for tomorrow.

Everything hurt all at once, but the dream would come and rescue the old woman from her body.

The dream would set the table for a conversation with our ghosts.

Sleep comes and wants to take us.

Where? I ask, but sleep doesn’t answer.

Dreams pouring the boiled kettle over frozen birdbaths.

Winter drinking darkness and fire, domino-ing subtractions.

The holiday misplaced its presents, your blue notebook of revisions, my new gray sweater.

The cold causing some to sing before the deer found us.

When the house gave up its shadows, we followed sun.

Cathedral rooms of snow, pages of blackbirds, sentences that don’t end, my sea-logged, sea-bird feather pen.

The apparitions on the first floor steal wax paper envelopes of stamps.

The golden Madonna staring directly into the camera lens.

Last night the protagonist of the story misplaced the magical horizon, followed the river’s ice-flow.

Given the chest X-rays, everyone dreamed the sickness away.

On last year’s footage, the mob’s delusions play out tragically until the end of a different book.

Rrecycle, re-use, re-group, re-focus.

Sea lily.

The hurt animal under the holly.

Victorian porch labyrinth.

Wrought iron bird cages and window boxes.

Don’t shovel the deck.

Tell them you’re preparing for someone else’s future.

Twilight loses its wing.

The dog sleeps in.

The stitching of the series reveals our nomad names.

It’s not too late to play the shortest day against the new hour of ice-moon. Hello.

The new book climbed the house with prognostications we could’t claim.

The dream neurologists said I forgot I had forgotten you.

The spinal cord refusing.

Others would be looking, not for us, but for themselves

I can’t feel anymore, she said.

We’re frozen to the empty skating pond.

He said, the muse tangled your hair through tree branches gone thin.

Away from sun.

Take heart, he said–

It’s all temporary.

The House is quiet.

It can’t get any darker than 4:15 in December.

He said my eyes glowed green in the afternoon light before the sun gently fell.

The garage was cleaned enough to house the car.

There was enough wood left over from last year for at least one fire.

The surgery would end spinal pain eventually, if successful.

2 weeks of 37 staples down the back, a painful zipper.

Some would visit.

The dog and cat draw near.

Hospitals are sad places.

Nervous birds blend in with the curled oak’s tired hands before supper.

One foot of winter stepping in seems cruel already.

Maybe snow for Christmas.

How are you?

There’s an envelope with a song for you I left in your mailbox.

A nuthatch in autumn leaves wrapped in white velvet that won’t last the night.

At the LOST & FOUND, I can’t wake up.

The wooden ruler with the metal edge sticking out has wreaked havoc while I was measuring the distance to stars.

I wish I could tell you [but I’m too tired of typing and blue-lit screens, election results and surgeries] —

how I long to be the poem you need.

The brain wanted to be skin that healed quickly.

Skin wanted to feel abstractions like hierarchy or revenge.

Stars wished upon falling humans.

Someone waited at the bottom of the stairs to catch the subject of the study.

There was talk of hostages during awkward dinners without salt.

The sea existed on calendars that never traveled.

We knew so much then, it hurt to sing.

Long paragraphs had cadences that went missing.

Flesh clings to its skeleton because the years chisel.

The old woman fell, and the stars couldn’t return her.

Small robots have taught themselves to play soccer.

They don’t manifest any addiction, anxiety, or despair.

When they vote for a leader, some will learn to paint.

Others will write poetry about unknowable gods.

The mouse in the wall found the hatchway that wouldn’t close completely.

The house is on high alert because of other tragedies.

War etched itself indelibly.

I don’t recognize myself in the wind.

There’s nothing suitable for binge watching.

It could be just another yesterday.

Someone said on Thursday.

Seven bluebirds line up before winter in a dream play.

A hundred blackbirds leave summer lawns with swoops and reordering.

The package never arrives with any conviction.

It’s preferable to stay awake and let sadness sleep.

Sadness dreams of the missing subject that slid past singing.

Skin uses all its energy to heal.

You should float in the sea to heal your open wounds.

Avoid the stretcher with the body that can’t surf air.

Salt gives the mouth more room.

The shrinking door or floor.

It’s hard to say.

When fire takes down the second floor, and the cathedral ceilings disembark—

you know you can’t go home anymore.

Oleaginous night turning clocks and black feather swans.

The moon might vent under the cloud river, but no one needs this story.

Life-size Russian dolls could interlock, then unlock a parade of wild particulars.

If human were a choice, fewer might graze the calendar, stare at our phones.

You’re multitasking on crack again—frenetically foraging false data.

Maybe lucid dreaming isn’t such a good idea.

Spells spill in Arabic at 2 AM.

The wind warned demise.

Side events drop the hardwood floor with winding banisters.

The canvas of sky and its pendant of sun dissipate dread for a weekend.

You should look away when the sports car crunches the guard rail.

Chinese Boxes interlock sleep-passage.

Tired rooms of spilled calligraphy.

Your laptop spoiling 5 AM.

The dog plays dead on his bed.

Some are sleeping.

Some are dreaming of horses caught in fire.

The last day of summer took the hero down.

When you stop believing in things, you become free.

Over-ripe grape and cherry tomatoes lose the rotting trellis.

On the stone marking incremental bloodshed, I sat with a paring knife to cut mythology down.

Heal me!, I cried in the language of the country I had studied for years.

No one recognized me, so I became a foreigner to history.

Take note of the nervous mourning doves on the electrical line fielding September wind.

Of the property of elasticity when the bitter vine chokes your rib cage.

The coat you’re threading with mercurial strings and steel blue buttons for winter.

Hours snare—an envelope of melancholic eiderdown guarding against a looming abyss.

Don’t stare into the gaping mouths of mountains.

Sirens won’t call you home where they won’t receive your elegant letters about vertigo and mis-remembered chances.

The old woman clenching her walking stick who stalks your dreams, refuses to call it a cane.

Days will go by.

The night of handsome stars dishevels faint moonlight.

We were encroaching answers while better questions wrote decisively on missing green stones.

All our wrongs drown in September’s river rush, somewhere pooled with strange kindness.

Unfortunate misdemeanors muddled plans to take over the excavations of buried dreams.

Oversized goats in someone else’s apartment grazed the emerald carpet before notebooks lost most pages.

The remaining soldiers, mere children without skin, knew the moon is impartial.

It watches as coins are counted by desperate mothers enumerating sorrows.

We chased sleep into houses with too many beds and not enough functioning doors.

Artificial intelligence wrote us encrypted memos to dodge rotating cubicles for the park while recruiting the newest blend.

Books never arrived.

Issues were skirted under slanted tabletops set for a dinner party that never drew close.

A drawer flew from the moving vehicle on a highway of trampolines and carousels.

I may have been there.

I don’t know.